We are all healing and alive, give thanks.
We wandered for months through Winter and waited breathless for Spring.
Now every day there is more, overnight the cherry trees budded and leafed, horsetail and nettle sprouted up and up, first handfuls of wild harvests, maple saplings everywhere, and every day momentum grows. Our Maypole is not yet erect but still laying down. Bryan can’t lift heavy things now and we wait for support. But our dear neighbor and I carried it off the stone wall and laid it on the earth and patiently unwound the ribbons from last year’s Hawthorne crown in meditative service. Those branches became tinder for this year’s fire.

Our ritual site to be at the edge of our property at a small waterfall, not one of our fire circles or normal ritual spots, but a place of natural magic and earth energy and watershed.

Max the cat sharing his offering, vole sacrifice, and then sharing of the egg balanced at equinox and fallen off the mantle at Beltane.

We didn’t know that it would be so magical, of course with the waterfall and these times and Beltane and all our challenges it couldn’t be other than magical but this Beltane ritual was really something else.There are a lot of pictures (thanks to photographer boy) and less words (thanks to the moment) But notes and pics as follows:
Time schedule and illness and recovery and reactions Tears and laughter and silence and shouting Flexibility and firmness.
Eating the last jar of last years peaches, tasting still like summer.
This time of the May is a presence, a moment in space. what is right at your feet and what is calling to you. what you need is always around you. what is around you is all you need. Crow and Raven chasing each other in the sky, pruning rosebushes, cutting flowers for vases, setting everything in right time, baskets together. these pics were taken by Bryan before any of us got there Note the figures

racing up and down the mountain friends right behind us, checking the grey smoke at the waterfall, settling in family with dinner appetizers, gathering and transporting baskets.
The first fire gone to embers when we got back allowed me to rebuild the flame dead wood at my feet and dead branches grasping my hair.

what you need is always around you. what is around you is all you need. thick farm yogurt with gratitude for the earth mother directions as meditation, breathe in the east and breathe it out, breathe in the south and breathe it out, breathe in the West and breathe it out, breathe in the North and let it go we are here and now the water filled the air with vaporized molecules and moved through you like a wall of oxygen, filling up and pushing out refreshing, reviving, renewing coffee for the ancestors
our sweet grass for the spirits and cedar and yarrow for the Gods & Goddesses

our wormwood for the seasonburning all of last year’s aromatic plants’ harvestoffering a pinch of her sage and a turmeric root offering flowering branches offering silence

let there be good healing for us all let us always be so happy & blessed let those who suffer be comforted & supported let us all know loveour omens pulled first as Ogham sticks, then runes, then the virtues all crafted by Bryan

From the Ancestors:the rune was Perthro or Luck, and the Ogham was the Ash which is like the World Tree-connections and interconnections, and the virtue is Fertility From the Spirits of Nature & Place:the rune was Nathuz or Need, and the tree was Hawthorne- a certain amount of purity and protection and also the sticks that started this fire, and Courage was the virtue From the Gods & Goddesses: the rune was Fehu or Fee, and the Ogham was Willow- intuitive flexibility, and the virtue was Integrity For the Season: the rune was Ansuz or Voice, and the Ogham was Holly-which relates to fire and strength but can also be about welcoming, and the virtue was Hospitality.

hallowing the waters and the out-of-nowhere puff of flame

giving thanks with the pop of a cork from Brooklyn beer like new years we all cheer our gratitude and ladies dance arm in arm

friends who are family feeding us all with fabulous finger licking good looking delicious food. Children escaping upstairs after dinner, everyone eating cookies until late in the night, what you need is always around you, what is around you is all you need.

So now the Maypole is up, centered by old friends and one-good-armed Bryan. Let’s dance.